Eyes Forward, Shoulders Back
by spatula spatula
Summary: Leather skirts meant date night. (Goren/Eames, post-ep for "See Me")


**fandom:** criminal intent  
**title:** eyes forward, shoulders back  
**author:** tahlia  
**feedback:** dayglo_parker@yahoo.com  
**rating:** r  
**category:** post-ep, "see me"  
**pairing:** goren/eames  
**disclaimer:** c'est la property de dick wolf et rene balcer. desolee.  
**summary:** Leather skirts meant date night.  
**notes:** thanks to tory for the beta and the title. 

  
"Call me Alex," she tells him. 

He won't. 

  
* 

  
She, in a brown leather skirt that cost half a month's salary, is sitting on her kitchen counter, legs dangling over the edge with him standing between them. She could hook her ankles around his waist, if she felt the inclination, but she doesn't. 

His hand slides up her thigh, underneath the leather, against her bare skin. She moans, shuts her eyes, and tips her head back so it's resting on the cabinet. Higher higher higher, and the other arm snaking around her waist and pulling her closer. Now she's precariously positioned -- pinned between him and the edge of the counter. It's uncomfortable; hell, the Formica is digging into her back where her shirt has been pushed up and exposed her skin. 

Her hands are everywhere and they aren't doing any good. He's the only one keeping her up. She doesn't mind, or maybe she does; she doesn't care. 

He kisses her. She pretends to taste passion, not bourbon. 

She licks her lips. "Call me Alex," she suggests, but he can't, he can't do it, because. Because, that... 

...that would be something else. 

  
* 

  
Leather skirts meant date night for Eames, because they didn't mix well with stale coffee, two AM forensic brainstorms, cranky DAs, and long long long interrogations. She partnered with this woman, Sarah Mijares, in Vice, who went to Specials Frauds when Eames moved to Major Cases. Sarah wore a leather skirt now, because she could, because she spent her day maintaining databases of con artists and travelers. 

So a leather skirt stayed in the closet, pinned to a dry cleaner's hanger, until called upon. Most times his name was Kenneth or Phillip and he was a lawyer or an accountant. And he was always threatened when she opened her purse to pay the tip and her gun caught the light in the restaurant just right. Sometimes he made a crack about art thieves, armed and dangerous, and then she would misplace his phone number. 

Tonight she put on a leather skirt. His name was Michael. Eames sat in the booth, trying to remember the last time coffee and cheesecake basked in the neon lights, was fun. Michael made an observation about Iraq and she smiled for the show of it all, because she had to think back too far. 

She flicked a piece of crust with her fork. Wrong. Once, she sat in that booth over there, by the window, checked her lipstick in a compact and crooned over a business man. She smiled, remembering the way her hands brushed against his wrist as she he got up to leave. Sir you're forgetting something, and then she slid those metal bracelets around his wrist, effortlessly. You have the right to remain silent... 

Outside, before she went in, fidgeting with the final details of the sting, Goren leaned in close from behind her and purred, "You look good." 

Sometimes, when she wanted to feel powerful, she wore that leather skirt. 

After it was over, Eames hailed a cab and let Michael kiss her on the cheek. He smiled, and she felt sorry for him, because she wasn't very good at his. There wasn't any time to get good. 

Her leather skirt meant date night, and it had been collecting dust lately. No room for it, anywhere. Same cycle: it's just her, the cat, Goren, them, the dead guy, the witnesses, the families, the ME, the captain, the suspects, the captain, Carver, Goren, them, them, them, them, them, and her again. Every day, infinitely, forever and ever, amen. 

No time for church. 

And, still, she remembered his breath, hot on her neck, the way it made her hairs stand on end and sent a shiver through her entire body. "You look good," and it was almost too intimate for Broadway and couple of dozen uniformed police officers. 

She stood in the middle of her living room, pantyhose discarded, in a leather skirt and bare feet. And then he knocked on the door, and she let him in. 

  
* 

  
He thinks he has a monopoly on childhood lies. He's wrong. 

"How's your mother?" she asks rhetorically. He turns, watches her shut the door, and shrugs, the way he does when he's had too much and trying not to show it. 

She takes a step closer to him. "Bobby, are you drunk?" Vacillating between professional concern and personal worry. They booked Dysart at around three in the afternoon and now it's a little past eleven. She does the calculations in her head: three, maybe four, drinks. 

He examines the layout of her living room, the grain of the wooden floor panels, then he looks up at her and stops. It's like he's suddenly realized where he is. He looks at her, takes her in, like he's seeing her for the first time. 

"I interrupted you," he finally says, noticing her bare feet. Suddenly, she can feel how cold the floor is underneath them. 

She shakes her head. "Nah. I just got home." There's an awkward moment. She doesn't tell him to leave, like she supposes she should. "You want something?" she says instead, indicates the kitchen, just in case... 

He understands. "Sure," and she moves in there to make a pot of coffee. 

Behind her, she can here him ambling about, his body weight moving over the few boards that always creak this time of year. And then there' s silence, nothing but the sound of coffee dripping into an empty pot, and she figures he's probably craning his neck to read the spines of the books of her shelf. (Although she suspects he's already got them memorized. It's all part of the routine.) _The Age of Innocence_ (new, dusty), Edith Hamilton (old, creased, dusty), the new one from Raoul Sabatelli (one of the only copies, from prison to the publisher to her; beach-stained), and then - 

She turns to say something to him, to raise her voice, but he's standing in the entrance to the kitchen, only a few feet away, and she stops short. Forgets what she was going to say. As if it even mattered, in the long run: they were probably just words to move along the silence, words with no weight or substance or meaning. Like the fluff she feeds a suspect to lull him into that false sense of security. 

He throws his body weight against the frame of the entrance, and she considers the two of them: him, dark suit, light blue dress shirt open at the collar, couple of buttons undone, tie long gone; unkempt and yet, attractive. Her, light blue bouncy top, brown leather skirt, bare feet, and that messy up-do that took longer than it should have; an odd collision of dressy and at-home casual. 

"How is she?" she asks, never letting her eyes leave him. He sighs, with the weight of the world split between his eyes and his sinking shoulders, and for a moment she feels a pang of anger. He thinks he's the only fucking kid who ever had parents that lied to him. He thinks he's the only one who ever had to walk into school, with everyone staring at - 

He lies. "She's better." Eames has never met the woman, but she knows he's lying. He always lies. 

On the counter, the pot hisses, announcing that the coffee is done. She wonders how much time must have passed for it to have come so quickly. 

She turns and raises her hand to open the cabinet and retrieve two mugs, but he is fast, quick like lightning, quicker than he should be with that much alcohol under his belt. He is behind her, close. He is invading her personal space, pressed up against her, and he lays one hand over hers on the door handle, and she freezes. He puts his other hand on her waist, low enough not to mistake his intent. She doesn't flinch, partly because his body mass is such that it wouldn't really matter, and partly because she can feel the spark through the thin material of her shirt. 

He kisses her neck, and she can smell it for the first time: his expensive cologne, one of the fine cigars he keeps locked away in the bottom drawer of his desk at home, and- She gasps a little when his tongue strokes the skin right below her lower ear. And cheap bourbon. He curls his fingers around hers. 

There is a pause, a brief moment, and she wriggles from his grasp and turns around, facing him. Or, rather, looking up at him, because without shoes or height of any kind, she barely clears his shoulders. She cranes her neck and stares at him. Once, he tries to kiss her, but the angle is too awkward, so with both hands on her hips, he helps her up onto the kitchen counter. 

Now she is at his eye level. Now, they are equals. They stare in silence for a while. And then he looks away, blinks twice, and whispers, "Sometimes, she doesn't know who I am." 

She can hear the sadness; it's hard not to. Once -- she remembers, he told her on their first stake-out, twenty hours in a car in the middle of February -- he was seven and he knocked his grandmother's vase off the dining room table, and it shattered into a dozen pieces, and she called him the son of Satan. And that his father sent him to his room, and said, "It's okay, Bobby. Mommy's just been listening to too many of Father McCullin's sermons in church." And that he believed him. 

So she kisses him, because it's the only thing she can think of to quell the anger she feels rising in her. 

  
* 

  
When she was thirteen, all she wanted was a big radio for her room, just like her friend, Charlene. So she dropped hints: casual mentions about her upcoming birthday to her parents. She worked hard in algebra, staying late with Sister McCue for extra help, so when she finally got that A, her father would be so proud. "You deserve something, Alexandra," (because her father always called her by her full name), and of course she said she wanted the radio. 

But her father hung his head and sighed. "You know we would in a second," he said, "but with your brother starting college in September, and the cost of sending you and Christopher to school..." So she sucked up her disappointment, and said she understood. 

For a month afterwards, her father worked later than usual, more often, putting in extra weekends and whatever overtime he could squeeze in. They hardly saw him. She knew her mother would worry -- she always worried, because she had been wary of her husband's obligation to follow in his father's footsteps -- but more so now. Sometimes, Alex would sit with her as she cried, rocking her back and forth like a scared child. On Sundays, her father would walk a beat, and the rest of her family would go to church and pray some drug addict or murder suspect wouldn't use their father as target practice. 

And, sure enough, a month later, she woke up on her birthday to find a brand new, shiny radio sitting at the foot of her bed. She felt a little guilty, knowing her father had worked just for this, knowing it had nearly killed their mother, but she threw her arms around his neck anyway and didn't let go. 

Two weeks later, a couple of men in suits came to the door. They took her father to the kitchen, and shut the door. They spoke in whispers, with her father occasionally raising his voice in obvious anger, but nonetheless, Alex and Christopher pressed their ears against the door, trying to eavesdrop. Their conversation was virtually unintelligible, until one of the men said, "kick backs," and she understood. She knew why Brian had stayed up in his room. Up the stairs she ran, with Christopher standing on the landing, begging for an explanation he was too young to comprehend. 

(At Christmas, Brian told her that Dad had shook down some cocaine dealers for a couple grand each, and had split the money between his tuition and her radio.) 

There was never enough to press charges, yet her father resigned anyway. But the damage was done and her parents could no longer afford the private school she and Christopher attended. So in September, Brian started as a freshman at La Salle on borrowed money and Alex started eighth grade in a public school. Somehow, they all knew her father was a dirty cop, so she had to hold her head high and pretend she didn't notice the way they stared and snickered. 

After the first day at that new school, she tucked the radio back into the box it came in, and stuffed it into a corner in her closet, and never looked back. 

  
* 

  
Her fingers in his belt loops, pulling him close, her hand positioning itself over him, and he moans into her mouth. 

"Call me Alex," she whispers, somewhat seductively. He slides his hand higher, instead. 

She comes there, pinned between the counter and him, with her skirt pushed up over her thighs. He's right behind her, too, hips thrusting instinctively. All a prelude, a preview, a reminder, of things to come. 

  
* 

  
Sheets twisted around them, and her name becomes his mantra. Eames, Eames, Eames, Eames. 

  
* 

  
She was in love once. 

She was a freshmen in college, and he was a senior. He was the aspiring lawyer, with grandiose dreams of changing the system from the inside. At eighteen Alex didn't know what she wanted out of life, and she was drawn to his passion. It was love from the first kiss to the first time they slept together, right up until he said he couldn't do it alone and told her to consider dropping out. "Higher education wouldn't do you much good anyway, Lex," and though he tried to twist it into something good after the fact, she slapped him, hard, and never looked back. 

Goren sat on the vic's desk, straddling the corpse propped up in the chair. But this, she thought. This was not love. 

Of course not. 

Oil and vinegar, in a whole new light. Sure, they never mixed, but when you thought of oil? You thought of vinegar. They fed off one another. It certainly wouldn't have a storybook ending, with declarations of love and roses and weddings and smiles. Not because it couldn't be that -- it could, if they tried -- but neither of them wanted to try. 

This. It kept them going. It kept him going. It used to fascinate her, the order he kept his life in, but after that first night she stopped noticing. Could no longer allow herself to see how desperately he tried, how he teetered on the edge of sanity and not. 

Just sex. So she ignored the way they slipped into the role of the married couple so easily, so believably. It was just sex, just comfort. Once she watched Carver storm out of the Deakin's office and remembered a time when she didn't think he was the bad guy. She looked at Goren; to him, Carver had always been the bad guy. 

It was just... He walked up to her as the officers led the businessman out of the dinner and she slid out of the booth. He smiled at her, and he was grateful and proud and. Something else. 

She thought, leading him into her bedroom: it was just sex. 

"Call me Alex," she said, but he couldn't do it, because that. That. That would be love. 

  
* 

  
A phone, ringing. She opens her eyes slowly: her phone. She glances at the clock, and it's 4:15 in the morning. A third ring. She answers it before the machine can pick it up. 

"Hello?" 

"Eames?" 

She turns her head, and he's gone. 

"Bobby." She sits up a little, holding the sheet modestly around her chest. "It's quarter after four." 

"Yeah, I know. Sorry about that." She swears she can hear a smile in his voice. 

On the floor, her eye catches her shirt, discarded in a clump a few feet away from her skirt. "You could have stayed," she says softly. Usually he does, in some respect: he leaves a note and they meet for coffee and eggs at the diner around the corner. 

There's silence on his end, and she thinks she can hear voices in the background. "Look, I hate to drag you out at this hour, but." 

"Where?" she asks, snapping into her professional mode. 

"Seventy-second and Central Park West." 

"What is it?" 

"Dead guy outside the Subway station." 

She balances the cordless phone between her ear and her shoulder, and jots the address down on a pad of paper placed on her bedside table for exactly this reason. "And homicide isn't picking this one up because...?" 

She can almost hear him smiling now. This is the exact question he was waiting for her to ask. "In his briefcase? $1,000,000 in diamonds. Same amount reported missing from a bank vault two days ago." 

She says she'll be there as soon as possible, and he's about to hang up. "Wait." A pause. "Bobby, are you all right?" Professional or personal, she's not sure. 

He sighs. For the first time, she notices how well he's pulled himself together. She wonders if he had time to go home and shower. In another moment, she wonders if he ever really went to sleep. 

"Yeah," he says, "I'm fine." 

And the cycle begins again. 

  


c'est tout. 


End file.
